orderfromchaos | 25. the driver was left-handed

Entry tags:

25. the driver was left-handed

[Spam for Cassel]

[He's just popping into the art room to grab a new sketch pad, but he pauses when he sees Cassel, hovers. He's in the middle of transforming something, and to Dillon it looks a little bit like eating pop rocks feels, alien static-y crackling, sharp bursts of understanding. Working doesn't supervene on physics even slightly; it's not something he could decipher without having seen it.

But when he does - the piece reflects the whole, the type reflects the kinds, and something that's been nagging him about Chris for weeks snaps harshly into place.

He is, he tells himself firmly, probably wrong. Stressed, projecting after what his other self did. It's not like Chris is here, so he can't be seeing - he just wants and answer, and of course he's assuming the worst possible -]

Cassel - hey - are you. Okay?

[They aren't really friends, though they've spoken a few times in passing, know each other mostly through Chris. He's distantly aware that he sounds both overbearing and like a socially maladapted idiot, but it doesn't really matter. The important thing is making Cassel react, so Dillon can get a proper bead on him, reassure himself that he is misunderstanding the powers he's only just gotten his first glimpse of.]

[Private to Bush]

...if you've got the time and the rum, I made Shepherd's pie.

[Obliquely referring to their agreement, sometime, to discuss his counterpart. Too many people are twisted up wrong. It's time.]

[Private to Jean and Iris]

Hey. Cassel's in the artroom with me, and he's all messed up - worked - but it's feelings so I can't fix it. It's really - he needs not to be like this.

[It is really hecked up.]

[Spam for Horatio]

He slides into a chair next to Horatio at the library, close enough for a low undercurrent of rejuvenation and calm, but not really enough to notice - like soft background music in a movie. He wonders if this is a good time. Probably not. Horatio is - concentrating.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[He's brought something in from the scrap drawer in his room - a scrubbed mini pie tin, which is now set propped up on an easel. He's been contemplating it for a while now, trying to figure out what to do with it. By the time Dillon comes in, he's in the process of transforming it into a foot-high plastic figurine of a velociraptor, on the logical basis that pretty much nothing is cooler than dinosaur figurines other than living dinosaurs, and he can't make those.]

[The pie tin has sprouted one long brown claw and a tail and has a plastic seam down the middle when Dillon speaks. Turning in his seat and taking his bare hand off of the tin, Cassel gives Dillon a quizzical smile. He's right: this is overbearing and socially bizarre, but he assumes there's some good reason for it. There's got to be. Maybe Dillon hit his head or something.]

Never been better. Why, was I making a weird face or something?

You, uh.

[Shit shit shit. He's not wrong. And this is going to freak him out, isn't it. It totally is.]

That thing. Some people can do it to people. Can't they.

Thing?

[He widens his eyes. It's an uncanny gesture on Cassel, who's never done doe-eyed innocence well but is pulling it off really accurately in this moment.]

The work? Sure. All the other kinds of work are exclusively effective on people, actually.

Chris has been. Um. A little off, for a while, and I think it's. That.

You too.

[You're dying, aren't you? It's a blood disease. AIDS? No, leukemia.]

[Leaning back in his chair so the front legs come off the floor, he gives Dillon a long, hard stare. He looks less innocent now. More angry, like he's trying to conceal it but he doesn't quite know how.]

You know, you're the second person who's said that. I don't think you people really know what you're saying.

[All but squirming, miserable and half-hunched and jumbled into fragments where Cassel is a smooth barricade.]

I don't. I don't, okay, I don't know anything about - work, but I know what it looks like when someone's had bits of their soul rearranged, I know that. It's a different mechanism but it's the same, all the gaps and tells, there's nothing else that does that.

[That looks wrong like that. The parts don't add up to the whole. The present doesn't nestle into the past. The future wavers and meanders and lists back to the path it always should have been on, wounded, limping.]

I get that you really. Really don't want it to be true, I don't either, but I can't ignore it again.

[He'd argue more. He really would, and he still doesn't believe it, but - again, Dillon says, again, and Cassel starts, sitting up so the legs of the chair bang flat on the floor. Everything comes crashing down. He takes the pie tin in his hand, turns it, a nervous tic, worried, worried.]

Again?

[Who?]

Edited 2015-01-13 03:42 (UTC)

My - brother. He could change people.

[It always feels impossible to explain what the other shards are to him. Not friends, never yet that. Brother feels as honest as anything else. Born from the same strange stellar ichor.]

He had a friend who wanted to be straight. But it wasn't him. It didn't fit. And I'm getting a lot of the same - like. Signals from you. Not about sex. Obviously. But - still the same.

[The way he's fighting himself, even now, grating and lurching, that's completely different from sly vicious way he usually fights himself.]

I don't fit?

[He doesn't understand. He feels like he fits. He feels perfectly natural.]

[But he remembers what Horatio said about his mother, about what she must have done, and what she said what feels like a hundred years ago. You wouldn't know good if it bit you in the ass. Maybe he wouldn't know himself, either.]

[The gears grind against each other more weakly, now. He's still fighting, but not quite so hard.]

[He doesn't hear the thought. He doesn't know the wording. But he knows, in his core, that someone told him it was for the best, just like Okoya told him - everything will be better, when you've brought the world into order. Even, maybe, believing it on some level, looking down on humans as self-destructive animals, scurrying about. But what it really means, always, is better for them, for the person saying it.]

They lied. Whoever told you it was good. You're - you were good before. You're wonderful.

[He doesn't, doesn't know Cassel well. But Dillon's seen the effects he has on people around him, too - Chris and Iris and Needy and more. Cassel didn't need to be fixed. But now - he does, and it's sick.]

You don't know me.

[One of the things he and Chris have in common - neither of them really believes they're all that wonderful. At least this time there's no sardonic smile to go along with it. Just a sad, sort of blank look, down at his feet.]

[He sets the tin back on the easel, pulls at it by the top until it's long and dull and snake-like, an ugly misshapen un-alive monstrosity. It looks about how he feels.]

[Dillon thinks almost everyone is wonderful; it's a hazard of knowing them so well. Without the breakneck urgency of the Vectors to divert his attention, no one is superficial to him.

He wants the unnamed thing twist and stretch.]

I know you don't want to keep feeling the way you feel right now.

Let us try and help. Please?

[His soul is overhung by a soot-gray cloud. He is melting, misshapen, broken. He knows, now, he knows, he does, but he doesn't want to feel anything. He can feel his own self, blocked, too far away and too amorphously inaccessible.]

[He can feel Chris, too, his mannerisms and melancholies overlaid like a gauzy cloth. It feels as though he's suffocating.]

[Looking down at his gloved hands, he shakes his head, shakes his head. But it's not a no.]

Edited 2015-01-17 02:04 (UTC)

[He's going to take the headshake as no, he doesn't want to feel this way. Which, while not exactly the kind of consent that would pass legal muster, is enough for Dillon. He stops asking, starts informing.]

I'm going to try something. I'm not going to touch you, but it's me, and it might feel a little strange.

[It feels nice. It feels - not like emotional calm, but like the intellectual concept of rightness, the satisfaction of looking at a perfectly organized bookshelf, a tangram solution, symmetrical arches. Like that notion of everything fitting together just right is suffusing the air around him like perfume, a harmony of base and middle and top notes he can't name off hand. And then it settles on his skin, mist, but charged, heady, sifting into him. And parts of him sing with it, unmangled fringes fitting into the chords, becoming smoother and steadier though not cleaner. But it stops, balks, hits a sheer wall at all the places that are really wrong, that are anathema to it, and cannot touch them.

Dillon's breath comes short in frustration and worry; he catches himself, eases off, seeps back into the circumference of his passive leash, the half-rightness fading like the last notes of loud music, echoing in the ear.]

...okay. That's. Out of my wheelhouse, then. But we're going to find a way to set you right, okay? I'm gonna. Call some people.

[Which he is already getting out his comm to do.]

Edited 2015-01-17 02:39 (UTC)

[It feels, to Cassel, like rocking in a hammock in a summer breeze. Not, to be perfectly clear, that he has ever done this. His childhood home didn't have space in the yard for a hammock, and anyway, outdoor activities were a priority for neither parent. His father was elsewhere, his mother was otherwise occupied, and his brothers, well, they were working. Everyone was working.]

[Everyone always works, Cassel thinks to himself, and thinks that this must be what relaxation feels like. He closes his eyes and leans his elbow against the table. So calm. So right. Just for a moment.]

[And then it's gone.]

[He opens his eyes and blinks at Dillon, eyes hollow and filmy like a sick animal.]

. . . Stay with me?

[He's a such a sucker for it. He remembers having things tangled and wrong inside of him, the kind of hollowness that came from being eaten from the inside. Cassel might not forgive him for it later, but he pushes out again, wraps as much of Cassel in his presence as he can, crisp like ozone, metronomic with his heartbeat, the sense that everything is just how it is supposed to be, except where it's incomplete, the pockets in Cassel it can't reach.]

Yeah. 'Course I will.

I'll bring a bottle.

[It is well time. The alcohol and food will dull the worst of it, he thinks.]

I'm just down the hall. One-twenty.

[Bush taps his knuckles on the door-- locked or unlocked, it is the better shipboard ettiquette.]

Mister Cole, it's Captain Bush. May I come in?

[Dillon's mom raised him polite, so he wouldn't dream of hollering at Bush to let himself in. He answers the door looking neat as ever and a little wan, but no worse than that.The cabin door opens on a normal, slightly nerdy, very early 90s boy's bedroom. It has the inescapable impression of neatness without actually being especially organized: loosely grouped items of clutter are nevertheless in perfect stacks or symmetrical grids. His clothes are folded where he threw them at corners, and the bed, at least, is neat as a pin.]

Come on through. Should I take your coat - jacket thing, or is that weird?

[There's a little kitchen attached, through the next door, two places immaculately laid out at the table. The second room is, if possible, eerier than the first. It's a homey room, with knickknack Saguaro and Prickly Pear salt and pepper shakers, childhood drawings on the fridge with googly-eyed magnets, a spill of pill bottles and old medical paperwork over one counter, most of it completely untouched in the year Dillon has lived here again. It's a room with soft ghosts.]

Chris is too. I couldn't fix it on me own but Jean and me together probably can. On me way, Dillon love.

Yeah. I could tell something was - but I didn't get it until I saw Cassel changing something.

Thanks.

I'll meet you both there. [She doesn't know Cassel, really - just to see him, to smile. But if something is wrong, she wants to fix it.]

Do you know who did it?

Nobody here. It happened in his world.

[He thinks, he thinks he knows - but it's such a blur, some of Cassel's homelife, all the usual clean fractal cogs of history-self melted and warped in certain places, over and over. It's hard to be sure.]

Edited 2015-01-17 21:36 (UTC)

[A slight grimace; that would have made things easier.]

How aware are they, of the change? [She speaks as she walks, running through all of Charles' teachings in her mind.]

Cassel knows. He doesn't want to know but - I tried to fix it and ended up kind of highlighting it instead because I can see what's wrong but I can't change it. He's, uh. Not in a great place.

[Crap. Another grimace, as she steps into the corridor.] Well - that could actually help, in the longterm. We might be able to see it better. [Where it's all wrong, where it doesn't fit.]

Yeah, it - I know exactly how it should be, now. I just can't quite. Touch it.

[A slight nod, as her brow furrows.] I - has Cassel told you how it works, exactly?

I felt it out pretty thoroughly with Chris, but I couldn't get a grip on the bloody thing. They don't work like I do. It was like trying to grab the soap in the bath. Except the bath were swimming pool sized and the soap burned your fingers.

I can see all of it - what's right and what's wrong and even how it got there and which bits remodeled on the edges - that part I straightened out - but I can't touch it. It feels like those old road runner cartoons to me, where he paints a tunnel on the cliff and zooms off into it, and I just hit stone.

You can look in my head, it'll be clearer without English.

[She only hesitates for a second. There's still so much about Dillon she doesn't know.

But she remembers the song of the stars, and she misses it.

So she opens her mind, and reaches out, gentle and careful. Show me, she says without words.]

Dillon? I'm hitching along with Jean, if you don't mind.

[Iris can't reach out that far to an alien mind under her own steam, but Jean can bridge that gap for her.

She's a curious, sparkling presence edging Jean's like a refraction of her inner light. And Iris can share her own experience of Chris' mind, the exact shape of the alterations from her perspective and the way she couldn't catch hold of it. Only a little of her frustration and rage colour her thoughts; the rest is kept safely shut away.]

Yeah, go for it.

[A little bit wry - there is a reason she's so wary of touching him. But he's okay with it.

And sure enough, Dillon's perspective is totally distinct from Iris's. He's not an Empath, and he doesn't feel what Cassel feels except with the very mundane, human sort of empathy that echoes pain it sees. Because Dillon sees it.

Everything is fractal to Dillon, if he looks hard enough, everything is pieces that echo wholes, histories that unfold and replicate, futures on a tree of deep-ply possible forkings, not determined but still predictable, pathways and possibilities. He sees the world like the wide-eyed entranced tinkering nephew of some absent-minded Clockmaker God who wandered off before screwing the back of the world over the cogs again.

And Cassel is one gleaming intricate exquisite node of that watch, whirring and connecting, but there are pieces - this mood, that particular brand of reckless - that do not fit, that are patently and obviously wrong, that don't belong with the parts around them, that weren't built in the same forge or from the same material, no matter now skillfully or neatly they've been inserted in place of the pieces that should be there. It's wrong in the essence and the existence, soul and life that ought to be inseparable substrates of each of each other. It horrifies Dillon and it hurts Cassel, that discordant chasm, now that he's aware of it, or it would hurt him, if Dillon weren't pressing him with the equivalent of psychic anesthesia.]

Edited 2015-01-23 06:23 (UTC)

[Jean's own fury, righteous and blazing, is also set aside; it's not something she can afford. She walks into Dillon's mind with solemn determination.

He sees the world so much like the Phoenix does; the bare gears and guts of the cosmos, shifting and grinding. What is, what will, what could be. And, most importantly, what shouldn't be.

She views it with a visceral distaste, every part of her agreed; this is wrong. Defective. Insulting.

(It reminds her, just slightly, of what the Barge felt like before she fixed it.)

Jean doesn't bother to shield or suppress the feeling, or the echo of memory; she lets it come and go, and then focuses on Iris' perspective. It's a more intimate view, vaguer but closer; another piece of the puzzle. Another tool in their repair.]

[Horatio doesn't notice himself relaxing. He's pleasantly oblivious to the tension draining from his shoulders, as he marks a slim black line on a yellowing, hand drawn star chart. He exhales, and slowly, all the knotted anger and worry and self hatred ebbs away to the back of his mind.

He even manages a small smile, when he registers Dillon sitting beside him.]

I didn't hear you approaching. Can I help you, Dillon?

You study this a lot, right? Stars.

I... I suppose you could say that, yes. Where I'm from, we use the night sky to navigate. I sometimes pass the time trying to chart some part of the heavens we pass through now, but it always proves futile in the end.

[He rests his head on his chin, and glances across to Dillon, easy and curious.]

Does it interest you?

Yeah, I guess.

Have you heard of a star called Mentarsus-H? I don't know, maybe it had a different name in your time.

[Horatio totally hasn't, because Dillon's author made it up and it doesn't exist in other universes.]

Mentarsus-H? [He frowns, then gives a small shake of his head.]. No, never. Though I shouldn't be surprised it it were discovered long after my time. Why?

Edited 2015-01-23 19:25 (UTC)

It went Nova, a couple years ago. For me. You could see it during the day for a couple months, with a clear horizon.

It's in Scorpius. It's. Green.

[Which clues may or may not lead Horatio to the conclusion that its closest counterpart can only be the best-named and only green star in the sky: Zubeneschamali. Or Beta Librae, for latin nerds; it's in the Arabic scorpion constellation, but not the European one.]

[Horatio's expression shifts to thoughtfulness, his mind perhaps skipping to Beta Librae, and he gives a small nod.]

Perhaps I do know it, by a different name. Could I ask, what does it mean for a star to go Nova?

It means it. Dies. Runs out of fuel and explodes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

25. the driver was left-handed

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

spam

Private

Private

Re: Private

Private

[private/Jean/Dillon]

[private/Jean/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

Re: [private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

Re: [private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

[private/Iris/Dillon]

Spam Post all the Iris/Roderick stuff?

sure

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject